Success – Plan B

It’s always nice when something works out 😉 As you know from yesterday’s post, Plan A wasn’t very successful at all! Matter of fact I spent prolly 3 hrs picking the stitches out .. Let me digress a bit here .. I usually use my Singer 15-91 for free motion quilting as it’s always spot on for me. When I got the urge to do this experiment, I really didn’t want to have to change over machines .. I remembered that I was given a feed dog cover for this machine and that I hadn’t tried freemotion on it since BEFORE I was mis-threading my machine – so I thought, why not try it out .. well Glory Be! The bloody thing works like a charm 😀 no having to swap over machines for this .. but of course I’ve never done free motion on this machine and was still getting a feel for it . normally i prefer to do a longer stitch when quilting – and believe me … these stitches were anything BUT long .. I was going beyond cross-eyed picking them out … they did get picked out tho

So today, I start by printing out on tissue paper the quilting motif I wanted to use for this quilt – went pretty good, the paper folded a bit on the way the way thru, but I wasn’t going to toss it for that .. So with a few dabs of my glue stitch I attached it to the quilt and load it up on my machine ..

What I decided to do before I went to far with it, was to do one ‘row / column’ of the pattern then check it out .. you can see that the tissue paper didn’t get all tore up like yesterday and that was even going back and forth over the tissue .. I did keep my eye on the back of the foot just in case. Oh, I discovered something else too .. once the first bit is stitched on, it’s pretty well attached and stabilized so you really don’t need to be adding more glue (I found this out later and learned a few more things .. share in a bit ;))

Checking my work after I got that first section down … not to shabby at all me thinks! I would have preferred to use a green thread for this, but damned if I could find one!! And I ripped a few places apart (no I didn’t check my closet – I prolly should have tho :() and no dark green thread that i was looking for … (altho I did find the blue I was thinking of using for my case 128 fan quilt ;)) I find the tissue came off fairly easily – I used the back of me seam ripper to weaken the paper a bit more since I was using a longer stitch. You can see in a few ‘points’ where there’s some paper (I also went a wee bit cross-eyed picking the paper out) I didn’t quite get right to the edge while starting this and I will extend the spots I miss later – that will come with time and practice using this method.

I went really cross-eyed here picking at the paper after I had done about 2 rows / columns in the design. I wanted to see a more overall look than the itty bit that I had pulled off earlier .. again the back of my seam ripper to weaken the paper, or using the flat of my seam ripper to lift the paper and it came right out! Oh for variety you can also scratch the paper away with your nail ;). There’s a few bits n pieces still in there, but I was going cross-eyed at that time and I’m really hoping that what I miss paper-wise, the washer will take care of ..

Repeating patterns can create a stack of paper you didn’t really want .. I need to do more than just see the repeat, I need to print just the ONE pattern out – else it does create many lips of paper that you have to watch for and more to pick out of the stitches later – less is better in this case ..

So after checking the first column I got busy and printed out what I hope will be enough tissue for the rest of this quilt .. if not, i can print out some more .. what I do want to do is maybe skinny out the lines on this or even use 20% black for the ink instead of 100% .. it doesn’t really need to be that dark or big.

I wanted to have this done today (and I still might), but watching a movie and a repeat of a weekly show I watch but missed last week over rode my quilting time .. I’m almost done the 2nd column – since i have the hang of this it shouldn’t be all that much longer – and tomorrow will be a busy day with the tier championship happening.

I learned a few more things today (shock surprise right?? Course I did – that was the whole point!)

All in all, I’m pleased with this method – I learned a lot and will use this method again and again .. once i got a system down with printing on the tissue paper, it wasn’t all that bad .. i only had my printer eat 2 – and i needed an extra bottom of the repeat for the bottom of the column anyways, so that rather worked out 😉 I’ve also got to get more comfortable with the edge, but i’ll put that down to first attempt as well as not ‘seeing’ exactly where the border was .. getting this down will come with practice – this is going to be quicker than marking a quilt as I perfect my own system for it. I also won’t have to worry about marking lines not coming out – they normally do, but strange things do happen .. this is me we’re talking about afterall …

I hope that everyone who wants to try a technique does – even if it doesn’t go as planned, you will find ways to make it work – and always you will learn from it. Hope you find my experiment helpful – Have fun with it!

If you can stand to wait until the quilt is off-machine, you can give it a tug diagonally and every which way and that will release a lot of the paper.

Alternately (because I know you’re sooooo patient), use a pointy stick, like a sharpened chopstick or a manicure stick, in one hand to score along the stitching and generally poke/pull the big pieces of fabric off.

The you can wield the mighty SERGER TWEEZERS to get the smaller pieces. Scratching it with your fingernail will also encourage the paper to hop off the quilt.

If you have the chance to find some of the tissue/thin paper that’s used on manucurists’ tables (I got mine at a beauty supply house), you might be able to print larger pieces so there’s less waste, yadda yadda. When it comes to machine quilting, my manicure stick and table paper are indispensible in my house!

Grace I have heard of quilting with this method for sometime now and have never used it. I guess I’m going to have to try now that I see how you have done on yours. Patience is a key word while quilting. Thanks for the view. Brenda M in Indiana

That’s great! I’m glad it’s working out for you. It looks really good 🙂 I read last night that you can use a water dissolvable stabilizer of interfacing. When your done you rip off most of the paper and then dissolve the rest. It would have been nice to know this a while back and would have prevented a lot of stretched stitches 🙂 I did just pick up a used HQ-16 and had it all up graded and boy, is it a dream! About a month ago I pinned a Tee-shirt quilt for a lady and I swear it took three days and 550 safety pins. Ohhhhh, my BACK!!!! It’s worth having it just for that. There was a lady down by Brighton selling one for about 4500.00 if you pick it up. Don’t know if she still has it. 🙂
Cindy

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to the place where I share my wacky thoughts, weird and novel ideas and even weirder math relating to my quilts and some other facets of my life. Comments are always welcome .. please feel free to add yours :)